a sort of diary

For years now, this blog and others have been warning that the Tories’ plan for the NHS is to end it – at least in any meaningful sense. Their claims that the NHS was ‘safe in our hands’ have been nonsense even before they were spoken, as the Conservatives were planning the withering of the NHS long before they became the leading party in coalition government in 2010.

As Noam Chomsky observed, the methodology is underhand but not complicated:

That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

But privatisation is not the ‘endgame’. Paying taxes to fund the NHS still means paying taxes – anathema to rich Tories. Making us pay for our treatment to private providers – that’s the endgame.

Private capital expects to make a profit – and to pay minimal taxes, so…